Can the local Department of Social Services promise that at least 41 percent of children entering the foster care system this year find new, permanent homes within 12 months?

It’s a worthy goal, but placement depends on many factors beyond Social Services’ control, not least of which is the rising number of children forced into foster care by their parents’ opioid addiction. Seventy-one children entered DSS custody in 2016-17, up 11 percent over the previous year.

The adoption requirement is one example of high-minded but hard-to-meet standards the state Department of Health and Human Services is imposing on counties as North Carolina develops regional offices to reorganize, supervise and support social services in the state’s 100 counties.

“Regional” in this case is a euphemism for “additional” — bureaucracy, that is — and it’s being imposed by the General Assembly under a law passed in 2017. Presented as a measure to require more oversight in child custody cases, the law had bipartisan support. Since passage, though, collaboration has morphed into regional supervision that, according to some sources, would measure each county on performance standards that the public could then see on an online “report card.”

Carried to the extreme, the law could create a mash-up of our far-removed, regional mental health system and the punitive letter grades now given to public schools. If the standards proposed for the coming year are any indication, the state is piecing together a Frankenstein that could wreak havoc on county Social Services departments and the vulnerable people they serve.

The goals of the legislation — better transparency, accountability and oversight for child protective services — could well be thwarted by excessive, unrealistic standards.

Donna Fayko, director of Social Services in Rowan, briefed county commissioners Monday on the new standards, which she said did not take into account many factors.  Each county must agree to the standards to receive funding, a fact causing consternation across the state.

In Moore County, interim DSS Director Laura Cockman recently told her commissioners the standards, for her department, were “setting it up to fail because the performance standards of the staff of social services is not the only factor or agency to consider in meeting the standards.”

Do state officials want county departments to fail in order to justify the regional bureaucracy? Surely not. But the officials obviously need more input from Social Services directors, the people who know their agencies’ challenges best.